The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (15 page)

Mainly, working on the line was about finding ways to make the hours go by so she
could get home to her kids. Sometimes she would change up and work her board front
to back, sometimes back to front. She played her music (mostly seventies R&B and funk—she
wasn’t that into hip-hop, she liked music made by instruments, not computers), which
she had to hear over an industrial fan and four or five other radios on the line.
Once, a white girl complained that Tammy’s radio was too loud, which actually meant
that Tammy’s music was too loud, which meant that it was too black. That was one of
the few run-ins she had on the line.

Most of all, she talked.

She spent more time with some people in the plant than she did with her family. She
went out for lunch with them—Eli’s Famous Bar-B-Que on Thomas Road, Cabaret on North
River Road where they cashed their checks on payday—and to bars like the Triangle
Inn and Café 83. Tammy didn’t drink like some of the others and go back to work and
get on that damn line that was going around and around—she didn’t know how they did
it. They had fun at work, too. There was this one old lady on the line who was the
nastiest, most ignorant person Tammy had ever met, but she was
funny
—she would come to work with a pig nose on her face and go around startling people,
groping the men. They celebrated everybody’s birthday in the department with a cake,
and they played football pools. Once, when she was out for a few months with Packard
hands, she and a coworker won the Super Bowl pool, and she had no idea until he brought
her half of the eight hundred dollars over to her house—he didn’t even have to tell
her.

A few of them became her close friends, like Karen, a black girl from the north side,
who got bumped off day turn and put on Tammy’s line in the afternoons, and Tammy trained
her. She called Karen her little big sister because Karen was ten years older and
a lot shorter. Karen had three kids, too, and they became best friends over that.
Or Judy, who shared a table with her at her final job at Packard, Judy’s machine on
one side, hers on the other, for three years. “That is how you build relationships,”
Tammy said, “and it’s not like we were just running all over the place like it is
in an office. We were stuck with each other. What else do you talk about? The tool
and die guy—‘How is your wife doing? How are your kids? How is your son doing in football?’”
When you worked with people that long, you watched their children grow up in the pictures
they showed. Later, after she had left the factory, what she would miss was the camaraderie.

Miss Sybil, Tammy’s friend from the east side, worked at a General Electric lightbulb
factory for thirty-eight years, from 1971 until she retired at age sixty-three, hauling
fifty-pound bags of cement. “Anybody who thinks factory jobs were good jobs needs
to go visit somebody on a line,” she said. “Most people wouldn’t survive in a factory.
Mitt Romney would die in a week.”

Tammy survived for nineteen years. She never thought of that as anything special,
and when anyone asked how she got through the work of doing the same thing a bazillion
times, she hardly knew what to say. She did what she was supposed to do. It was a
paycheck, a decent paycheck, and that saved her so she could save her kids.

*   *   *

Tammy didn’t know Flip Williams very well, he was ten years older, though she knew
his brother. Flip controlled the drug trade in the KimmelBrooks projects on the east
side. He went to California and became a Crip and did prison time for cocaine trafficking
in the late eighties. When he got out, he came back to Youngstown and tried to take
over again at the Brooks. On the night of Labor Day in 1991, Flip went with three
teenagers to a house in the Brooks where a dealer who had taken control of the local
crack trade lived, and they handcuffed him and duct-taped his mouth. (He had planned
everything, drawn maps of the house, used walkie-talkies he bought at RadioShack.)
Flip told one of the teenagers, his girlfriend, to phone the guy’s two friends who
ran the trade with him, and she lured them to the house. While all this was happening,
a fourth man, Teddy Wynn—he was a cousin of Barry, the father of Tammy’s first child,
and had just gotten out of the air force—happened to stop by the house for a visit.
Wrong place, wrong time. Flip tied them all up, then he strangled Teddy and one of
the others, had his girlfriend turn up the stereo to muffle the noise, went room to
room, and shot all four in the head.

By the time Flip was finally executed for the Labor Day Massacre by lethal injection
in 2005, the KimmelBrooks projects had been torn down, rebuilt, and renamed Rockford
Village. Tammy felt the execution was long overdue. Flip had committed a lot of other
murders on the east side that they didn’t even catch him for. How do you hold someone
in jail who caused so much devastation in one community?

In the late eighties and nineties, Youngstown always made the top ten cities for homicides,
and it led the country in the murder of black women under sixty-five. The media put
the focus on Mafia killings, because during those years Youngstown was the scene of
a border war between the Genovese and Lucchese families, with a lot of high-profile
mob hits—in 1996 a Mahoning County prosecutor, just about the only county official
not in the pay of organized crime, was shot in his kitchen and lived. By the end of
the nineties there was no money left in Youngstown to fight over, and the Mafia wars
died out. But Youngstown went on being Murdertown, because most of the killings were
happening in neighborhoods like Tammy’s, over drugs and dis.

Tammy knew too many people who’d been killed to count. When she looked over the smiling
faces in her yearbooks, she could point to the kids who’d ended up dead, or in jail
or on drugs, and it was at least half. A girl at her high school was shot in a drive-by
at the Brooks. One of her best friends from childhood, Geneva, dropped out of high
school and had two daughters, and right around the time Tammy graduated from East,
a guy got out of a car and started arguing with Geneva, threw her down to the ground,
and shot her in the head. No one was ever arrested. Tammy’s uncle Anthony, a junkie
like his older sister Vickie, was killed and his body dumped on the east side. “The
late eighties through the nineties, Youngstown just got crazy, really crazy,” Tammy
said. “When you think about it, there weren’t jobs.”

When Tammy’s brothers were coming up, she assumed they identified as Crips because
they were always wearing the blue. They lived with their mother on Shehy Street, two
blocks from Charlotte, and sold outside the house and ruled the street. Tammy never
saw their father give them any discipline. Their mother tried—she wanted more for
them, it hurt her that they were always getting into trouble—but they talked back
to her in a way Tammy never would have. Vickie was using again, though Tammy didn’t
know it at the time—for years she believed that her mother had stayed clean since
Tammy was in sixth or seventh grade. Vickie would have Tammy drive her to pick up
something from a friend, or bring money to someone she owed, and only later Tammy
understood that it was drugs, and she was enabling her mother. She found out the truth
when her mother got addicted to the Oxycontin they were giving her for pain because
she had degenerative osteoarthritis, where her joints just disintegrated and her bones
got so brittle they would crack if she moved the wrong way, and the doctor at the
nursing home where Vickie was a patient let Tammy know that her mother was on heroin.

Around the corner from Vickie’s house there was another gang, the Ayers Street Playas,
who identified as Bloods. In the late nineties, Tammy’s brothers were on the front
line of a gang turf war over the crack trade, though Tammy didn’t realize that until
later, either—“I wasn’t really entrenched in the stuff that was going on, because
I had kids and I was trying to keep them out of it.” One day, the oldest brother,
James, was shot and wounded in broad daylight on the front porch of the house on Shehy
Street. The youngest brother, Edwin, was sitting in a car with a friend in the vacant
lot next to the house one night—a guy with a gun walked up to the window and reached
past Edwin and shot his friend. A few years later, a different car, sitting with a
different friend and the middle brother, Dwayne, Edwin was shot three times in the
back by a gunman in a ski mask. He survived. Both Dwayne and Edwin ended up doing
serious prison time.

Vickie’s house on Shehy Street was right next door to a store, F&N Food Market, that
was notorious for trouble outside, including a craps game that drew violent gamblers.
One day, Edwin and Dwayne—they were in their late teens—were shooting dice behind
the store with two Puerto Rican guys. Dwayne had his gun under a chair cushion in
case of trouble. A friend of the Thomas boys, John Perdue, drove up and joined the
game. Within minutes Perdue and one of the Puerto Ricans, Raymond Ortiz, were arguing
about a five-dollar bet. Ortiz grabbed Dwayne’s gun and demanded the money. Perdue
refused to pay. Dwayne calmed Ortiz down, and Ortiz and his friend walked away to
their car, but then they came back—Ortiz was still in a rage—and the argument continued.
It ended when Ortiz threatened or hit Perdue with the gun, and Perdue grabbed the
gun and shot Ortiz in the head.

Vickie knew the dead man’s mother, and because it was the Thomas boys’ friend who’d
killed him, with Dwayne’s gun, over a craps game next to Vickie’s house, there was
a lot of bad blood between the two families. Not long after the killing, Vickie’s
house was shot up—bullet holes in her refrigerator and oven—and Tammy moved her mother
out. Then someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the house and the first floor was
gutted. The mayor of Youngstown ordered his staff “to immediately tear down the fire-damaged,
drug-ridden, violence-prone home at 1343 Shehy St.,”
The
Vindicator
reported, under the headline
NUISANCE HOUSE DESTROYED
. A city backhoe rolled onto the lawn and began to claw down the front porch while
neighbors watched in approval. “The East Side eyesore was gone by early afternoon.”
The house had been worth around four thousand dollars. Its loss devastated Vickie.

By then, Tammy had left the east side.

Several times in the early nineties, kids broke into the house on Charlotte. Granny
was around ninety and legally blind, and Tammy had moved her to the first floor. Tammy
was stuck working afternoon turn, which meant that she didn’t get home until midnight,
but she couldn’t afford to pay someone to stay at the house. Her children had to be
babysat after school at her friend’s mother’s house on the south side, where Tammy
picked them up on her way home. Until then, Granny was alone, and Tammy was afraid
that someone would break in again and do something to hurt her because she couldn’t
see. After twenty years at 1319 Charlotte Avenue she moved the family out in May 1992.
Granny had lived on the east side for more than half a century, and she lasted just
three months on the south side before she died.

Tammy rented out the house on Charlotte for three years. In 1995 she decided to sell
it. All she could get was five thousand dollars, half of what Granny had paid in 1972,
from a lady who then moved back to Puerto Rico and rented it out. After that the house
started to decline, until it went vacant in the 2000s.

Tammy paid twenty-three thousand dollars for her house on the south side. It was painted
orange, with four thick columns across the front porch, and beautiful on the inside.
The neighborhood was above Indianola, an area that had been all white when Tammy lived
on the south side as a girl, but now it was changing fast, with whites hurrying out
and Section 8 renters moving in, including a lot of people she knew from the east
side. Tammy had a fiancé on the south side. His name was Brian, and she had known
him in high school, though he was two years older (most of her friends were older).
They started dating in 1990, and Brian became like a father to all three of her kids,
especially her younger daughter. He didn’t have a steady job—he worked on and off
as an aide for the schools—but he helped Tammy deal with losing Granny, and he loved
her kids. In 1995, around the time of her twenty-ninth birthday, Brian asked Tammy
to marry him. She didn’t answer right away. She went to Cleveland with three of her
girlfriends on a birthday trip, and they checked into a hotel, and Tammy discussed
it with her girlfriends and decided to say yes, and it was right around the time they
checked out of the hotel to go shopping that Brian was killed.

She never found out exactly what happened—an argument with someone whose family Tammy
had known since he was four or five. “Brian was such a good guy,” she said, “but I
don’t know what affiliations he had. I didn’t know anything wrong or bad about him.
He had the biggest heart that I’ve ever found in a guy, and my kids loved him.” A
friend told Tammy that her younger daughter, who was seven, needed to go see a counselor,
but Tammy shrugged it off—“She’s okay”—because that was how Tammy had made it through
three decades of life, telling herself, “It’s okay, it’s all right, I’ll rebound.”
Ten years later, Tammy went away on a church retreat, and when she returned she was
livid to find that her daughter had gotten a tattoo. But she softened when she saw
that it was the years of Brian’s birth and death and his initials. That’s when she
understood: her daughter had never grieved for the only man she called Dad.

In the year after Brian got killed, Tammy started going to Mill Creek Park three days
a week, sometimes every day, after taking the kids to school if she was working afternoon
turn, or when she got off work if she was doing day turn. She would walk the trails
and sit by the old wooden flour mill along the river, with the sound of a waterfall
rushing over the dam, and be alone with God, and think and rejuvenate.